Slow DJ

My relationship to music is basically that of the DJ. I’m a song junkie, roaming across genres from the unsigned to the uncool finding tracks that get into my head and putting them together for sub-80-minute sets. Tracks clash and fray, fit sweetly together or contrast meaningfully, and the whole takes you on a journey that moves, that educates, and that does that primal music thing of giving you feelings there aren’t words for.

No, there are only three differences between me and a DJ: first, I do it incredibly slowly. It takes between a month – fastest ever – and a year to get a set together. Second, I don’t play my set in the club; I burn it onto CD, give it a silly name and drive to it. Third, most anyone who hears a set doesn’t think of it as a set at all, but as a random assemblage of pop songs that make no sense whatsoever as a compilation.

Those people are wrong, and I intend to prove it by going through a compilation, a track at a time, and discussing why I like them and how I think they fit together. And no, I won’t be posting the mp3s. Go find them if they sound worth it. Nothing’s rare.

I’ve found, through this blog, a whole bunch of people as obsessive about the same fade-edged genre of Mature Readers comics as I am. I risk alienating those people by a) writing about music and b) revealing my own personal taste in music, which I’ve never found to be widely shared. Still, perhaps we’ll all bond over that too, creating a strange nucleus of fans able to wax lyrical about Skreemer one minute and Kylie Minogue’s Where Is The Feeling Brothers In Rhythm Soundtrack Mix the next. You’ll never know if you don’t try.

Beginning tomorrow with my most recent compilation, the extremely poppy Coyote Summer, I will expose the music-loving part of my soul that sometimes feels like the best of it. And perhaps, as with the comics, I’ll find out why I care.